Full-text searching of data is becoming increasingly popular and significant in the computing world. For many years, the information-retrieval community has had to deal with the storage of documents and with the retrieval of documents based on one or more keywords. Since the burgeoning of the Internet and the feasibility of storing documents on-line, retrieval of documents based on keywords has become a complex problem. A search result may contain massive information. Typically, a filter may be utilized to filter the search result to obtain narrower information based on a set of rules.
Typically, an application client that initiates a full-text search has to maintain the filter. That is, when the application client submits a full-text search query, the application client has to create and maintain a filter throughout the search session. Otherwise, the same filter has to be recreated in every search session. In addition, a filter is typically represented by a filter object referenced by a filter object handle, where a filter handle is typically represented by a hexadecimal number (is it?) which is not user friendly to an application programmer has to maintain and there is no human friendly reference.